Late in June, 14 chess champions ages 11 to 17 gathered for the 1st Schein-Friedman Scholastic Project Camp -- a free week long high level, intense chess class taught by two of the nation's top chess instructors and coaches. The class or camp, as it's sometimes called, was sponsored by the Schein-Friedman Scholastic Project, with the help of the US Chess School (this camp was also the 21st USCS camp).

The students and parents were very grateful to Mark Schein and Aviv Friedman, the two founders of the Schein-Friedman Foundation, with special thanks to Greg Shahade, and to Dr. Jim Roberts, the main sponsor of the USCS. The instructors were IM Armen Ambartsoumian, Head Coach of the American Chess Academy, and multi-time US youth coach for the world championships, and IM Greg Shahade, founder of New York Masters, the U.S. Chess League, and the US Chess School.

The students each had a minimum rating of 2100 and were from Texas, New York, California, and Hawaii.

The class was held in the music room of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles in Glendale, California, where each student had an unobstructed view of the projector screen, the chess demo board, and the instructors.

IM Armen Ambartsoumian

IM Greg Shahade

The instructors asked about each student's chess goals, chess playing style, and their other hobbies.

They were very kind and respectful and considerate to each student. Chilled water and snacks were personally handed out to each student every day and the instructors tried to make it as comfortable as possible with fans and AC units amidst the extreme heat wave in Los Angeles that week.

In the afternoons, each student played a challenging endgame position against a fellow student with 15 minutes on the clocks. IM Armen went over the games with the students, stressing that even GMs had difficulty in these positions. Four of the positions that were given are shown below. The object in each is for black to try and draw or win. Go ahead and challenge someone at these positions - good luck!

Black to move

A lesson in calculations and reaching a zugzwang. The moves and behind the scenes suggestions were some of the possible tries in the position:

A lesson on the potential agility of a Rook versus two minor pieces, especially in an endgame. Black just played the dubious 22....g5?! White obliges, while it took some time, it was clear who was having all the fun:

During the breaks, IM Greg played a blitz game with a young champion to get to know each student better while the other students played bughouse. A similar match from a couple years ago against Sam Sevian became a viral sensation, with almost 1 million views!

On the first day, IM Armen lectured on the importance of accurately evaluating chess positions with equal material. He started with evaluating the static position such as king safety, piece placement, pawn structure, open or closed position, whether the king was castled or not, open files and diagonals, etc.

He showed many tournament games where the positions were equal and then after just a few moves, one side was in a much worse position due to inaccurate evaluations. He went on to explain how accurate evaluations and obvious next moves little by little add up to a much-improved position. IM Armen explained how even top chess players had difficulty accurately evaluating positions.

He recommended annotating games without any chess engine first, putting details such as missed tactic, wrong calculation, knowledge problems, etc. Then after the annotation is done, a chess engine can verify the annotation was correct. If there are common problems in openings, middle games, and end games, these problems can be worked on and corrected.

Armen recommended playing blind chess with anyone in order to visualize the chess board and pieces in your mind. He also mentioned the importance of studying end game strategies in order to better understand the middle game and openings.

Armen talked about playing openings comfortable to you and how openings evolve into different openings.

IM Greg Shahade talked about the importance of returning to the previous position after moving to an unfavorable position. He showed several tournament games on how continuing in the unfavorable position would result in increasingly worse positions. He also showed how going back to the previous position would produce better results although students are normally taught not to do that.

Greg also went over positional chess strategies and analyzed the positions from many tournament games with the students. He had the students find the best moves for many positions, challenging the students to get the highest number of moves correct.

The class also analyzed many tournament games of Emmanuel Lasker, the world chess champion for the longest number of years: 27 years. Greg had the students find the best moves for various positions in Lasker's games and then had open discussions about the various moves.

On the last day, the students played a round robin 3 minute blitz tournament with the extra player having the privilege of playing against FM Aviv Friedman.

FM Aviv Freidman (left) playing blitz with Eldon Nakagawa

It was a fun and mentally challenging class and the students gained valuable knowledge to help them become better chess players and bigger chess champions!

Aloha and Mahalo to the Schein-Friedman Scholastic Project and the US Chess School and IM Armen, IM Greg, and FM Aviv!